The sense of grammar: Language as semeiotic By Michael Shapiro (review)

BOOK NOTICES 233 reçue of an anti-semiotic bias in Humboldt's thinking; Scharf expUcitly sets out to rectify Chomsky's idiosyncratic and historicaUy inaccurate interpretation of Humboldt as a predecessor ofgenerative grammarby offering a more impartial rendering of the latter's conception of language. Part III contains two contributions devoted to the 'Semiotic history of phüosophy'. St. Augustine and Wittgenstein are contrasted by D. Böhler, who views them as representatives of the solipsistic/cognitive and pragmatic or communicative theories of language function, respectively. FinaUy, H. Parret proposes semiotics as the third—and indeed ultimate— Philosophie première of Western thought, following ontology and epistomology. This coUection of articles wUl mainly be of interest to experts in semiotics and phüosophy; there is Uttle here for the general linguistic audience , who wiU probably not want to pay the rather steep price. The work does not pretend to be a comprehensive, or even homogeneous, depiction of the development of the field of semiotics over the centuries: indeed, the heterogeneous , often contradictory character of the contributions reflects the varying views of the contributors on how the task is to be approached and what it should include. The value of this book wUl Ue not in furnishing the scholarly world with a final picture—or even major pieces of it—but in paving the way for a history of semiotics by providing a forum for discussing the Unes that such a work should take. [Thomas F. Shannon, Berkeley.] The sense of grammar: Language as semeiotic. By Michael Shapiro. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983. Pp. xi, 236. $27.50. Addressing in this work the why of language structure, within a framework based on the semeiotics of C. S. Peirce (P's preferred spelUng is used here), Shapiro proposes that modern Unguistics turn away from the Chomskyan paradigm and toward a 'neo-structuraUst' model. S attempts to 'make sense of grammar' by asking why certain expressions are associated with certain contexts, and to account for these correlations through their values in terms of semeiotic motivation, or markedness (hereafter often 'm'). Markedness alone, S claims, allows us to explain—and not just describe—the correlations between form and content in language. Part I, 'Theoretical prolegomena', sets forth Peirce's semeiotic, and sketches S's own conception of a Peircean theory of grammar. Here S leads the reader through an often bewüdering array of triads, taxonomies, and arcane terminology ; the key is P's understanding of semeiosis as involving an interprétant which relates the sign to its object. In language, aU levels are structured by identical principles of organization governed by markedness. One central principle, especially in phonology, is M-assimilation : the